Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

AT WAR

Lt. Ashley White in marksmanship training during Cultural Support Team training for deployment.Credit U.S.Army photo by SSG. Russell Lee Klika

Two women have now earned the Army’s elite Ranger designation. A third is in the final phase of Ranger School, the humidity-soaked “swamp phase” that ends later this month.

In the wake of this history making, Ranger School is now officially opened to women. And now Navy leaders say they are on track to open their arduous basic underwater demolition/SEAL training course to “anybody who can meet the gender non-specific standards” early next year.

Yet in this case the schoolhouse lags behind the battlefield. Women have served, taken fire and sacrificed their lives alongside the Army Rangers of the 75th Ranger Regiment for years.

I had no idea of this fact when, in 2012, a Marine told me about First Lt. Ashley White and her band of teammates who had been recruited for Ranger and SEAL combat missions a year earlier. They were part of what would come to be called cultural support teams, or C.S.T.s, a benign name for a groundbreaking concept.

Photo

Ms. White at Kent State ROTC.Credit Courtesy

“What about the combat ban?” I asked, full of disbelief since I had not heard about this story despite having reported from Afghanistan for years.

Her response was the equivalent of my mother-in-law’s frequently issued “bless her heart,” a verbal pat on the head offered to those clueless souls lacking in awareness of just how much they do not know.

“Just check it out; you’ll see,” she said.

I did. And with each interview I finished, I realized that I had stumbled across a community of women recruited to “become part of history” and to join combat operations back in 2011, first by the United States Special Operations Command and then by the Army Special Operations Command. All while the combat ban remained very much in place. These soldiers and service members (not all were Army) could be there, legally, despite the ban on women in ground combat because they were “attached” to special operations teams, just not “assigned” to them.

Battlefield needs drove the decision to recruit, train and deploy this band of teammates who became friends and, ultimately, family. Special operations leaders believed America would never kill its way to the end of its wars. It needed more knowledge, and the knowledge held by half the population remained out of reach; because of Afghan cultural traditions, women could not and would not speak to male soldiers. All that these women saw, knew and heard remained out of reach. That fact led the head of joint special operations command to request a team of American women soldiers fit and skilled enough to serve alongside his highly trained and tested men.

So the call went out and a team of women from across the Army, Guard and Reserve, and some from the Air Force and Navy, answered after a selection process lovingly termed “100 Hours of Hell.” Twenty or so of these women would accompany Rangers, SEALs, and other special ops teams on “direct action” missions, including nighttime raids aimed at keeping pressure on the blossoming insurgency. They boarded the helicopter in the night’s starry blackness every evening like any other member of the team. And on the objective, they would take fire, find people and things and gather information aimed at accomplishing the night’s mission.

They served their country and they placed themselves in harm’s way each night. And on Oct. 22, 2011, Lieutenant White was killed in action on a combat operation alongside two Rangers, Sgt. First Class Kristoffer Domeij and Pfc. Christopher Horns. Sergeant Domeij was on his 14th deployment; Lieutenant White and Private Horns on their first.

By the time I met them in 2013, Lieutenant White’s teammates had returned from war. They mourned their beloved teammate and they vowed to keep her memory alive. But they also mourned the battlefield camaraderie, the shared experience and the concentrated purpose of serving America on the front lines of its longest war.

Photo

Two members of Cultural Support Team-2 on deployment in Afghanistan.Credit Courtesy

Their friendship was a living, breathing thing. I saw that immediately as I sat around a kitchen table in Fayetteville, N.C., and watched six or seven of these teammates snack on Triscuits and cheddar cheese and talk about their time in Afghanistan with their Ranger platoons and other special operations units. They finished one another’s sentences, stepped on one another’s jokes and pushed fast forward on each other’s stories.

They would not talk about themselves, but they praised each other. “I was so proud the night the Rangers gave Isabel the award,” one of them said to me of her partner in southern Afghanistan. “Just to be sitting there and seeing how much respect they had for her because she had made a difference that night.”

Another team member chimed in and interrupted and I realized only later, when reviewing my notes, that I had to write faster than I normally did because almost no one could finish a sentence without her teammate interrupting to add to the story.

“Yeah, remember the night we went out on mission together with your platoon and the woman told us all about the I.E.D.s and her grandmother got so angry that we knew?”

“I would stay up every night to make sure all of you guys got back from mission,” another said.

It went on like that, that night of conversation and many, many others that followed, with me asking questions of one woman, and her friend and teammate answering with the full story. Frequently they made me laugh, such as when discussing the utility of Spanx (undergarments that the women would wear to make their made-for-men uniforms fit better), the questions they received when traveling together (were they nurses or softball teammates?), and just how they dealt with using the restroom on missions (there is a device called a Shewee, though few used it).

But the one question, aside from Lieutenant White’s legacy, on which each one was eloquent on her own behalf was what it had meant to lose the link to the Rangers and others special operations teams they served alongside.

“It was awful, like all ties just cut,” said one team member, a West Pointer and military police officer. “Those guys are your brothers and then they’re gone.”

It is not that they won immediate acceptance from the Rangers and SEALs alongside whom they served. At the outset, skepticism at having to offer up a precious seat on a helicopter to a soldier with a different training cycle, recruiting process and a mere six-week train-up for the mission abounded – especially given that that soldier was female.

But these men had adapted repeatedly to the shape-shifting nature of the post-9/11 wars. And by that point in the war, most everyone wanted solutions and battlefield advantage. The cultural support team members understood they would have to earn their place, and all they sought was a fair shot at doing so. That they received. One skeptical team of SEALs expressed doubt about taking its C.S.T. member on a mission, until she found the intelligence item they were looking for to connect an insurgent to recent attacks wrapped up in a baby’s wet diaper. The soldier had helped accomplish the night’s mission and that is what mattered.

The rotation was only one year, but it had quite clearly changed the women’s lives forever. It had ushered them into a special operations community in which they would serve on a mission they felt mattered, alongside the best of the best, at the heart of America’s effort in Afghanistan. And then it had sent them back to their regular Army roles once their time was up. That left them only with one another – their memories, their war stories, their battlefield accomplishments – to remind them that their deployment, their time on the frontlines of battle, had actually happened.

And from that shared experience of war they had forged a family unto themselves and built a community of friends and sisters stronger than nearly any other tie they had without, at least until that point, anyone noticing.

But what these women had done and sacrificed on the battlefield had not gone unnoticed by military leadership. And in June 2013, Lieutenant White and her teammates received a nugget of credit few noted then in a story playing out now.

“Quite frankly, I was encouraged by just the physical performance of some of the young girls that aspire to go into the cultural support teams,” then-Maj. Gen. Bennet Sacolick of Special Operations Command said at the time at a Pentagon news conference on the opening of combat roles previously closed to women. “They very well may provide a foundation for ultimate integration.”

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book is the New York Times bestseller “Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield.” Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Fast Company and New York Times International, among other outlets, and she is a contributor to Atlantic Media’s Defense One. You can find more of her work at //www.gaylelemmon.com and follow her on Twitter at @gaylelemmon .

The recent success of two female officers, both West Point graduates, in passing the Army’s grueling Ranger School has bolstered arguments for the full integration of women into the military’s front-line combat units. In becoming the first women to receive the coveted Ranger tab, the two officers proved that women can handle not just the physical challenges but also the psychological and leadership tests posed by the nine-week course.

Their graduation could not have come at a more important moment: In September, the heads of each armed services branch must tell Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter which positions and units they believe they can integrate and provide evidence for why any other position should remain closed.

Photo

The author at Al-Taqqaddam Air Field, Iraq, in 2007.Credit Kyleanne Hunter

As that deadline looms, the Marine Corps is dealing with its own gender-related controversy. In June, Lt. Col. Kate Germano was removed from her position as commander of the Fourth Battalion at Parris Island, the Marines’ all-female boot camp. During her time as commander, Colonel Germano asserted that the Marines’ setting lower standards for women than men led to an underlying sexism in the ranks, one that systematically kept women from reaching their full potential.

It is noteworthy that most of the reports and commentary about Colonel Germano’s case have been written by men. Some pieces have been sympathetic to her situation, including one by Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine Corps officer, who used her case to give an honest and objective look at the systemic problems acting as barriers for women in the Marines. He argued that an institutionalized “hyper-masculinity” is a greater barrier than physical standards to the full integration of women into all military positions. It is a point that needs deeper discussion.

To add breadth and depth to this conversation, and to take it beyond Colonel Germano’s case, I believe it is time to speak out about my experiences. The more women who are willing to speak about the way in which the ingrained hyper-masculinity hinders progress toward integrated forces, the closer we will come to an honest conversation about the true hurdles to gender integration.

Colonel Germano’s case is one example. Mine is another.

I joined the Marine Corps a year after graduating from Georgetown University. Feeling stagnant in my civilian job, I was looking for a physical and mental challenge, and the Corps’ ethos of “honor, courage and commitment” appealed to me. Those entering the Marines as officers do so via the Marine Corps’ Officer Candidate School, known as O.C.S., in Quantico, Va. This 10-week course is designed to test an individual’s mettle and their ability to be a leader of Marines.

Unlike enlisted boot camp, where all training is in a gender-segregated environment, the vast majority of O.C.S. is integrated. Female platoons have their own sleeping and hygiene accommodations but perform all physical and academic training in the same environment as males. Though this training and evaluation is simultaneous, women still have a lower standard for purely physical tasks. While O.C.S., and the subsequent Basic School that all Marine officers attend, is gender integrated, the Infantry Officer’s Course and several advanced courses, such as Mountain Warfare Training Center and Marine Corps Special Operations, remain closed to women.

The physical standards for Marine Corps training are extremely demanding. Leading up to O.C.S. I would make the trek to my Officer Selection Office for rigorous training: Seven-to-10-mile runs in combat boots and utilities, weekly physical fitness tests, weight training and the long marches that we affectionately call “humps.” I was able to run three miles (the Marines’ fitness test standard) in under 18 minutes, get my scrawny bike-racer arms to do pull-ups, and even condition my feet to run mile after mile in boots.

Heading into O.C.S. I was focused, confident and strong. Though I was aware that there were separate male and female standards for physical performance, being the only woman at my selection office, I continually held myself to the men’s standard.

At my initial fitness test at O.C.S., I ran three miles in 16 minutes 58 seconds. I was beaten only by the company commander (who would later become a friend and mentor when I was stationed at New River in Jacksonville, N.C.), and one of the male candidates I had spent the summer training with (and who had been training for the Olympic track team as his back-up plan to the Marines).

I was incredibly proud of my performance. I had given my best. I had proved that I belonged — no, that I was better than — the men chosen to audition to become the elite of the elite, leaders of Marines. When I returned to my platoon’s squad bay, however, I was greeted with a different sentiment.

“Who do you think you are, candidate?” my platoon commander, a woman, barked. I must have stared back blankly, as I received a barrage of insults for several minutes. I was later counseled that the standard for women was 21 minutes, and that I should get used to running slower.

For the rest of my time at O.C.S., I was continually pushed to the back of runs and told to “learn what was expected of me.” When I and another female Marine were near the front of a company run, we were asked why we hadn’t fallen out like females are supposed to.

(I must add that my platoon sergeant was an incredible Marine who continues to encourage women to be their physical best. She is a rare exception.)

I could tell several other stories like this. While men in my squadron were praised and received accolades for getting perfect scores on their fitness tests, I was rewarded with, “We’re glad Captain Hunter is leaving the squadron so we won’t get beaten by a girl any longer.” I don’t fault any one male in particular for this, but rather an institution that has conditioned Marines to expect less from its members who are born female.

My experiences go beyond the expected harassment or normal button-pushing of Marines undergoing their initial training. By forcing women to adhere to a lower standard than men, and by effectively punishing them for exceeding their given standard, the institution is setting them up for failure.

It is no wonder that the first women to attempt the Infantry Officer Course have failed. The course, even tougher than O.C.S., has been opened in recent years to female volunteers as part of the Marines’ study of gender integration into the infantry. I would argue the women’s failure is due to the fact that female Marines have been denied an even playing field from the beginning. While men have generally spent over a year physically preparing for the demands of the Infantry Officer Course, the women who have attempted the course have done so with mere months of notice.

When an institution expects less of one group, and mandates lower standards for that group, there is no way that it will progress without a great deal of reform.

During her tenure at Parris Island, Colonel Germano proved that the majority of women could meet the “higher” standard if given the tools and the expectations. Was it easy? No. But should we expect anything less of those who choose to serve in the service with the slogan “The Few. The Proud”?

Yet rather than rewarding her for innovative and effective training techniques, she was punished. The military is an inherently physical business. Initial impressions of fellow military members are frequently based on their physical performance. By conveying this truth to her recruits, Colonel Germano was setting them up for success, not berating them. The sad truth is that by institutionally expecting less of women, women begin to expect less of themselves.

Upon successfully completing O.C.S. and Basic School, I went to flight school and became an AH-1W “Super Cobra” pilot. As the only female pilot on multiple combat deployments, I can attest to the cultural bias that the dual standards produce. Combat does not care about your gender. Flying the Cobra required the same physical and mental acuteness from me as it did from my male counterparts. Yet despite proving myself time and time again, the lower standards meant that my performance would always be called into question.

In 2012 I left the Marine Corps to study the impact of gender integration on fighting groups. Both my own experiences and the situation surrounding Colonel Germano highlight the reality that the biggest barrier to integration is changing a long-established culture of fighting men.

It has been proven that the barriers to women’s integration are not physical, but institutional. The recent completion of the Army’s Ranger School by two women should quell once and for all the misguided belief that women are unable to meet the standards required for elite combat units.

However, even in the wake of this historic accomplishment, there are those who question its validity. Despite these critics, the Army is standing by the success of the soldiers and the validity of the process they went through. The Navy has even announced that they will be opening SEAL training to women. The institutional tide is shifting. It is time the Corps started looking for a Few Good Marines, not just a Few Good Men.

Kyleanne Hunter is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She served was a United States Marine officer for 10 years, serving as an AH-1W pilot and liaison officer to the House of Representatives.

Wars often produce iconic images that capture the naked truths of the struggle. Five Marines raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. A South Vietnamese general calmly fires a pistol into the head of a suspected Vietcong militant during the Tet offensive. A Huey evacuates Americans from a roof in Saigon in the spring of 1975.

Photo

Lt. Col. Rod Coffey and the insurgent flag his unit captured in Diyala Province, Iraq, in 2008. The same banner would eventually be used by the Islamic State.Credit

One image from our experience in the United States Army during the Iraq war stands out. It is a photograph of our squadron commander, then Lt. Col. Rod Coffey, holding a captured flag. The flag is now the widely known black banner of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. The photograph was taken by one of Colonel Coffey’s soldiers in March 2008 after American forces completely defeated insurgents in a portion of Diyala Province. Colonel Coffey stands with the flag in his right hand, his trademark cigar dangling in his left and the look of a man resolved to defeat militants whose barbarism today is ever so disturbingly documented by the media.

The flag is not unique to the Islamic State. Variations of the black banner adorned with the declaration of faith known as the shahada are used by other Islamic extremists. However, there is little doubt in our minds that the enemy our unit fought and defeated that winter would eventually become part of the Islamic State. Our unit found the flag near a mass grave site and an insurgent training camp.

Our unit — Third Squadron, Second Stryker Cavalry Regiment — then spent several days assisting Iraqi families in properly burying their dead. This was one of the many actions Colonel Coffey and our unit embraced to build trust with the Iraqis who had previously lived under the tyranny of the militant Islamists. Once sufficiently powerful American forces were in place to allow the people of Iraq to defy the extremists, Colonel Coffey worked closely with the senior sheikhs and political leaders to maintain the peace. He often told his men that the greatest weapon they wielded in the fight was decency.

Like many of his subordinates, Colonel Coffey was on his second deployment to Iraq. He received a Silver Star for his actions in the initial thrust of American forces into Baghdad known as Thunder Run in 2003. The colonel was a rugged man set against a desolate environment but also a cerebral student of military history, the art of counterinsurgency and the writings of Thomas Hardy.

At the time, the black flag was not as iconic a symbol as it has become in the last year with the Islamic State’s successes in Iraq and Syria. However, the capture of that flag was a moment of victory that recalls previous wars in which tangible evidence of an enemy’s defeat was more prevalent. The enemy our unit faced sought to fight the superior Americans asymmetrically with improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.s, snipers and hit-and-run tactics. Earlier in the deployment, Colonel Coffey’s unit was handpicked to clear a neighborhood of Baghdad that The Los Angeles Times called Al Qaeda’s “Alamo” during the end of the surge campaign. We lost six soldiers during that successful operation that served in many ways as a coda to the American military’s surge operations in Baghdad. In Diyala Province our unit would lose six more service members and a faithful Iraqi interpreter after insurgents rigged a house to explode when American soldiers searched it. As Colonel Coffey was a student of military history, the symbolism of capturing his enemy’s colors was gratifying to him and a fitting tribute to his fallen brethren.

Although the Islamic State seeks to portray itself as an impressive military force, the insurgents we faced did not put up much of a fight when met with a well-coordinated offensive. Instead they sought to dissolve into the populace. The barbarity the Islamic State regularly displays is not unfamiliar to American service members who had the unpleasant experience of encountering its antecedent in Iraq. More important, we know from our experience that it can be defeated. The Islamic State’s military successes of the past year should be seen for what they are: fragile and reversible.

Soldiers do not choose their wars. Our grandfathers’ mandate in World War II was clear and just. As we reflect on our war and the friends we lost, images like this help to vindicate our fight. While policy makers debated and then realized that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of service members protected Iraqi civilians against violence and chaos. What was clear back then and even more so today is the inhumanity of groups like the Islamic State and their tendency to cower and flee when faced with an organized force.

When deciding what to do with the captured colors, Colonel Coffey followed an unspoken code of quiet honor and dignity that American soldiers from Valley Forge to Gettysburg to Normandy would easily identify, acknowledge and respect. Instead of mounting the flag in a trophy case behind glass, he presented it to the local Iraqi security forces. This simple gesture served as a symbol of shared sacrifice and a reminder of the threat to Iraqi liberty, a threat that is now being confronted by the Iraqis themselves.

Joe Myers served two tours in Iraq as an Army fire support officer in 2005 and 2007-8. He is currently an analyst with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Tim Hsia served with Joe on both of his deployments. He works at Pocket, and is on the Service to School, or S2S, leadership team. Service to School provides free assistance to veterans applying to higher education institutions.

We step off the C-130 ramp from 13,000 feet above the Florida Keys and into a radiant, cool blue sky, cloudless yet hazy on the horizon. Arms interlocked, Dan, Paul and I skydive in a three-man formation while a fourth chases us with his helmet-cam. There is nothing inherently unique about the act of falling at 149 miles per hour, not after you’ve done it enough. But this jump has a sacramental feel even at terminal velocity, and I know it’s due to the name of the drop zone beneath us.

Photo

Matthew Komatsu, holding the flag on the right, after parachuting onto Loggerhead Island in May with fellow pararescuemen to honor Lt. Col. Christopher K. Raible of the Marines.Credit Jesse Stoda

I’m not sure when the military started naming parachute drop zones for the fallen. But among Air Force pararescuemen and combat rescue officers like Dan, Paul and me, it’s standard practice to name drop zones for fallen brothers. Cunningham Drop Zone: named for Jason Cunningham, a pararescueman, or PJ, who died on Roberts Ridge during Operation Anaconda in 2002. Maltz Drop Zone: named for a PJ killed in a 2003 Afghanistan helicopter crash. Plite. Gentz, the first combat rescue officer, or CRO, to die in Afghanistan. Flores. The list goes on.

Dan emailed me a few months back and said it was time to do the same. Not for a PJ or CRO, but a Marine we had carried in our arms: Lt. Col. Christopher K. Raible. The commander of a deployed squadron of Harriers, Colonel Raible died defending his men from 15 heavily armed insurgents who slipped inside the perimeter of Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, on Sept. 14, 2012. Dan, Paul, and I were all there that night – but at the end of the night, it was Dan who escorted Colonel Raible’s flag-covered remains from the Harrier Squadron to the hospital. Dan’s goodbye salute was the first of many to come during the colonel’s long journey home.

•

At 6,000 feet, the three of us break apart and track across the sky away from one another before deploying our parachutes. It’s not until my chute is open, and I’m suspended a half-mile above the blue-green waters of Dry Tortugas National Park that I can actually appreciate the view. To the east five kilometers is Fort Jefferson – a Civil War era fortress whose dark battlements took 30 years to build. Beneath me, Loggerhead Island looks like an elongated skateboard. A narrow beach rings the 1.5 mile perimeter of the island, holding back fields of green that consist mainly of prickly pear cactus.

On the beach is an orange upside down “V” assembled from large rubber panels – this indicates wind is from the north. White caps on the waves verify 5- to 10-knot winds. Paul maneuvers his parachute so he’s lower than Dan and me and “sets the pattern” for us to all land on the V. He’s got several hundred jumps under his belt, so Paul is well qualified to land on target, despite the beach’s being only 20 yards wide. It’s the narrowest drop zone I’ve ever seen.

One hundred feet above the beach, I try to freeze the panorama with all my senses. The lighthouse, helicopters parked in the background. White beach and green water. A picture could never do this moment justice, could never pair the view with how it feels to descend under a silken wing. The sound of the chute flapping in wind. The feel of the canopy control lines in my hands; lines I can tickle to land me exactly where I want. The knowledge that all this will be over in seconds, and I will be earthbound once more.

•

Dan emailed our plans to Colonel Raible’s widow, Donnella: a small gathering to commemorate him and a memorial plaque that would go into the National Park Service caretaker home on the island. He asked if she would send some mementos she would like to see enshrined.

When Donnella’s package arrived, Dan sent me this text: “Not gonna lie … whole night comes back … pretty sure someone is cutting onions nearby … I will ensure the plaque and ceremony preserves his legacy.” There were five photos, a coin, and two patches. In one photo, Donnella posed in front of a fireplace with the three kids. In another, a Christmas wreath rested against his Arlington headstone, evergreen on gray lithochrome.

•

Photo

Dan, left, and Mr. Komatsu folding the flag that will be given to the Raible family.Credit Jesse Stoda

We gather alongside a dozen other jumpers under the shade of some palm trees near the lighthouse. Dan pulls out the plaque and stands in the sun with me while I share some memories of the night with the men, then pause for a moment to consider our peaceful surroundings. There is nothing to hear but the surf and the wind that shakes the palm fronds.

Dan reads the plaque, then a handwritten note on a green sticky from Donnella. He makes it through only a few words before emotion overcomes him. Another PJ takes over to finish reading. Then I pull a 3-foot by 5-foot embroidered American flag from my right cargo pocket where it resided during the jump. We pose for a team photo with the flag and the plaque in front of the lighthouse. The photo will go on a certificate that will accompany the flag back to the Raible family, along with a few mementos not unlike what Donnella sent us. The plaque goes to the caretakers.

Then it’s done and the guys scatter. I run the beach, and as I round the southern tip of the island, the expanse of blue is a reminder of the distance and solitude it affords. After a few miles, I rest in the cool of the ocean until the thrum of my heartbeat disappears from my ears; soon there is only the calm arrival of swells borne by the fetch of a wind that began a thousand miles away.

•

The morning we depart, a caretaker and I exchange greetings, and she asks me about the plaque. The caretakers are temporary National Park Service volunteers, two of whom always live in the simple, two-story edifice a stone’s throw from the lighthouse. She asks polite questions, never prods. Simply nods and murmurs when I tell her my story. She tells me that after they affixed the plaque to the wall, the caretakers stayed up into the night discussing Colonel Raible, whose name they didn’t know until we fell from the sky to honor his legacy. They wrote an entry in the home log to describe what they saw. That way, she says, everyone will know his name.

Matthew Komatsu is a full-time Alaska Air National Guardsman and a second-year student in the University of Alaska, Anchorage M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. He has published multiple pieces here; in War, Literature and the Arts; and has an essay coming in the fall issue of Brevity. You can follow him at www.matthewkomatsu.com or on Twitter @Matthew_Komatsu.The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, the Defense Department or any branch of the United States government

My wedding day was the first best day of my life. I could not have ordered a more perfect day if I had had a menu of choices in front of me. The marriage to my best friend was what I was really looking forward to. I wanted to settle down and start a family and that’s what we did. Our ideal world was lost on Sept. 6th, 2003. My husband, a member of the National Guard, was activated two days before our second son was born. Two weeks later he went to Iraq on what ended up being almost a year-and-a-half journey where he fought for his country and I fought to maintain our home.

For years after his deployment, I watched him struggle. I scratched and clawed to get him resources that were difficult to coordinate. I begged for tests; I fought to be the voice he did not have; I fought to be heard. He would tell his health-care providers one thing, but I would witness another. They experimented with a string of antipsychotic drugs, leaving me to deal with the potential dangerous side effects without any heads up. I put up with way more than I should have, but I held tight to our “for better or worse” vows and the unbending belief that if the tables were turned he would do the same for me. He would take care of me, right? After years of working through the system, we finally got the diagnoses of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on top of post-traumatic stress disorder. His care team fought hard to make sure his needs were met. We even started a nonprofit geared toward helping veterans and their families.

As time went by, two more babies came. My husband had moments of happiness, but generally was deep in depression, struggling with severe migraines and issues with TBI. Suffice it to say that certain lines were crossed, and I felt I could no longer remain married to him. I asked him to leave and, on Friday, our divorce became final. He let me go without hesitation. For him, there was apparently no reason to fight to keep me. I don’t want to come across as a bitter ex-wife. But I am angry that our happy life, our loving relationship was destroyed in combat.

After all I had been through with him, I was now faced with another reality. Once you are divorced from a veteran, resources such as counseling go away. I even asked for help to tell him to leave the house but was told no, even though I worried for my safety. I was told their services were to provide a safe place for the veteran.

After all the hard work, devotion and advocacy, I felt demoted, unloved.

Veterans need to learn how to reintegrate into their families and how to take care of those families again; how to trust their spouses again. As a caregiver, you are put in a position of authority over your spouse, doling out daily “what to do’s,” managing the finances. What toll does that take on a marriage that is supposed to be built on equal partnership? At the same time, the caregiver feels forgotten, berated and belittled because his or her complaints pale in comparison to the pain, emotional or otherwise, of the veteran. What happens when we get sick? Surely we do not want to be told, as some spouses are, “It’s not like you’re dying! I know guys whose legs have been blown off.”

As it turns out, I am lucky. I have a job with benefits. But there are so many other military spouses who gave up careers and education to take care of their wounded partners, only to see their marriages disintegrate and find themselves emotionally devastated and without money. At that point, they no longer have access to the multitude of resources available to veterans and their families, such as Department of Veterans Affairs individual or group counseling or educational benefits. Many women who were dependent on their spouses’ incomes also find themselves financially in shambles after divorce. Such women, unless they were fiduciaries of their husbands’ veterans benefits, might have no access to that money during, or after, marriage.

So, now I am asking myself, what are those spouses supposed to do when they too serve their country and work so hard to help veterans and their families, but are not eligible for their services anymore because they are not family anymore. Many of us feel angry, like we were left holding the empty bag. I really wanted what my parents had, that 50 years together, growing old together thing. I wanted to be worth fighting for, too.

Jackie McMichael is from Durham, N.C., where she currently works as a professional development manager in the software industry. She was married for 15 years to an officer in the North Carolina National Guard and currently works in her spare time with veteran spouses and organizations.

This month, the Marine Corps began a historic experiment at its base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., to test women’s performance in combat arms. This Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force uses high-tech tools to measure the physical performance of both men and women after a federal mandate to integrate women into all military occupational specialties — or request an exception — by January 2016. This differs from the past two decades, in which combat performance has only been measured in large-scale desert exercises. As a former Marine who was encouraged by the camaraderie of gender-integrated training, I look forward to this study’s promise to increase force readiness in a corps that is not quite 7 percent female.

As a 19-year-old R.O.T.C. midshipman in the summer of 2000, I went to Twentynine Palms for a distant granddaddy of the current experiment: a Combined Arms Exercise, which measured an infantry battalion’s combat readiness. A white government school bus delivered two dozen of us midshipmen to the base: eight women and the rest men.

In those weeks, we observed a company closing with its target and calling in mortars on old, bombed-out vehicles. Specially trained senior enlisted personnel and officers — called “coyotes” — monitored fires and kept notes on accuracy and timing. With instincts honed over hundreds of exercises, they evaluated unit performance on tasks such as conducting a raid and conducting a ground attack, standards the corps carefully maintains. Individual performance, however, wasn’t measured; platoons were expected to show up already trained. And all the combat arms specialties we encountered — such as firing rockets and roaring through the desert in armored vehicles — were open only to men.

But our instructor, a former Force Reconnaissance captain, made no mention of gender when assigning tasks; we all hiked the same terrain and carried the same supplies in our packs. I tried hard to keep up with one strong midshipman as her calves churned soft sand, knowing I’d see her again the following summer at Officer Candidates School. When we split into four-person fire teams to observe a reserve unit’s live-fire exercises, I was the only woman in mine, but we all looked identical in helmets and load-bearing vests.

The differences between the sexes that I experienced were surmountable. One afternoon, while others napped under camouflage netting, heavy with the smell of gear and sweat, I finagled my first taste of “Vitamin M,” the 800 milligram Motrin pill the Marine Corps doles out for pain. I told the doctor I had a stomach ache.

“You’re dehydrated,” he said. “What you want to do is drink water, maybe have a little salt tab — –”

“No, Doc,” I said. “I mean a girl stomach ache. I have cramps.”

He raised his eyebrows but coughed up the Motrin. I downed it and continued training.

The most significant integration came when we bedded down in the field. We split up not by sex, but by fire team. Team by team, we rolled out our sleeping bags on gravel and took turns standing watch. My brothers in arms slept to my left and my right, several feet away.

In the 15 years since then, the Marine Corps’ desert combat exercises have evolved to replicate environments found in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for a time incorporated gear for the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System, a military version of laser tag. The training focused on units ranging in size from 30 to 1,000 Marines. Only a few men-only roles now remain, in fields including infantry, artillery, tanks, light armored vehicles and amphibious assault vehicles, or A.A.V.s.

This spring, researchers in the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force are evaluating both men and women in tasks including “marching under loads, fire and movement, providing offensive fires, defensive operations, conducting crew/casualty evacuations … ammunition resupply and A.A.V. water recovery,” according to Katelyn Allison, a University of Pittsburgh faculty member who is a co-principal investigator for the project.

Squads consist of up to 25 percent women, which means they can range from three women and 10 men one day, to one woman and 12 men the next, to a men-only squad later. This changing composition aims to correct for individual personality differences that can affect the teamwork of any combat unit.

And while my medical care was just Motrin, these Marines are being monitored at a whole new level.

Before even starting, the participants underwent a two-day test battery to gauge their baseline body composition, musculoskeletal strength, aerobic and anaerobic power capacity, balance and flexibility, Dr. Allison explained. They will continue to undergo these tests at different times during and after training.

Over the next three months, trainers will be collecting more data as the Marines run through simulated combat scenarios, including live-fire movement to contact and pulling heavy crash test dummies from vehicles. GPS will track each Marine’s position, weapon-mounted sensors will count shots fired, and wired targets will record the timing of each bullet, so that researchers can triangulate who fired where and when. Heart rate monitors will measure individual Marines’ physical exertion in real time; subsequent after-action surveys and cortisol swabs will match the Marines’ reported efforts to their actual physiological states.

This avalanche of data offers individualized detail, complementary to the gestalt approach of eagle-eyed coyotes scribbling handwritten notes as I watched 15 summers ago. This specificity can help the researchers filter the effects of any one Marine.

The aim, Dr. Allison said, “is to establish gender-neutral characteristics that can predict safe and successful completion of ground combat tactical training and tasks.” If remediation is necessary for subsets of the population, she said, “targeted physical training may aim to increase overall force readiness and resiliency.” In other words, smaller female Marines might need additional physical training to prepare for inclusion into combat arms specialties. But so might short, slender men. Targeted training would increase the probability that more female Marines could fill combat arms roles, and could help the corps comply with federally mandated gender integration.

But Dr. Allison also warned that “the load is the same regardless of the size of the person carrying or moving the load,” and “Marines of smaller stature may find difficulty.”

This is consistent with my experience; I am 5-foot-1 and 118 pounds. Marching 20 miles in 80 pounds of gear was more difficult for me than for my bigger comrades, but not impossible. I gained confidence from my stay in Twentynine Palms that carried me through gender-integrated basic officer training. I was encouraged that although the percentage of women was small, we could integrate as much as possible if we performed to the same standards. After all, years later, no one cared that I was a woman when our battalion convoyed from Kuwait into Iraq.

So I’m rooting for the young women of the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force as the Marine Corps takes their measure in this challenge. If in the future, at the end of a day of hoisting ammunition or clambering out of assault vehicles, a young Marine shakes out her sleeping bag and rests her head on a rolled-up sweatshirt, and to her left and her right are brothers — and sisters — in arms, it will expand the historical definition of a combat warrior.

Teresa Fazio was a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006, deploying once to Iraq. She lives and works in New York City, and is writing a memoir set during and after deployment. She is also a member of the Truman National Security Project Defense Council.You can follow her on Twitter.

Once a year the streets of Philadelphia overflow with Marines, both active duty and veterans, celebrating the Marine Corps’ birthday on Nov. 10th. And it was in the “City of Brotherly Love” that I met a fellow Marine infantry veteran, Patrick Maxwell, last fall. We didn’t speak with each other much, but he knew my wars were over. What I didn’t know was that his weren’t.

Patrick didn’t share his plans with me then, but it wasn’t long before he contacted me from a village near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. He’d just come back from patrol with the Kurdish peshmerga forces. Patrick, honorably discharged in 2011, had returned to fight alongside the Kurds against the self-proclaimed Islamic State just weeks after our conversation. Not as a Marine, but as a civilian volunteer.

The full story of Patrick’s journey is told here. But his story began long before he traveled to Iraq to fight a second time.

In 2006, Patrick deployed to Iraq’s deadliest province, Anbar, in the south. But he never fired his weapon and I could understand his disappointment. I had spent the first months of my deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan anxious and saddened because I hadn’t pulled my trigger – the very thing Marines are trained to do. So I knew what he meant when he said he “felt robbed.” And so I understood why he went to fight alongside the peshmerga.

Even though I carry the weight of the lives I’ve stolen, some of them innocent, I was jealous of him and it upsets me that I don’t fully understand why. A part of me wanted to fight beside him. The other half despises the very thought. My desire for war is something I believe I will always struggle with even though my longing for peace is much stronger.

The first time I killed someone I was not under fire. A scrawny man with a Kalashnikov lurked toward our position in Falluja, Iraq. I watched as he fell to the ground with one slow, steady press of my rifle’s trigger. At first, all I felt was recoil. But I kept looking back. I couldn’t believe I had killed a man. And I did so with a smile. Because he could have killed one of us.

When my battalion fought in the siege of Falluja in 2004, the images of the World Trade Centers and Pentagon burning that drove me to enlist were no longer on my mind. The American lives lost on the fourth hijacked plane, Flight 93, weren’t what compelled me to squeeze my trigger. For me, combat had nothing to do with America or Old Glory. All aspects of my wars forged a brotherhood of Marines that cannot be replicated; an impenetrable circle of riflemen fighting to live, killing for each other. Perhaps I have been missing that.

Yet when you live life knowing that you’ve killed someone, it is scary. When I reflect on what it took for me to end a person’s life, I cannot recreate my mindset. To spill blood and end a life, I forced myself to rationalize that another human should die. And power over life is addicting. Very addicting. You miss it. You daydream about it. Nothing is more petrifying than being aggressively hunted by another human. And there is nothing more exhilarating than when you kill them first.

There is another motivation that drives veterans of the Iraq war to want to return to the fight there: Seeing Islamic State celebrate victory in the villages where our friends bled or died fighting the insurgency. It makes many of us wonder if our war was for nothing, that perhaps we failed.

So that is the jumble of emotions I felt when I heard Patrick’s story, and that I’m guessing other veterans of the Iraq war feel as they watch the battle against the Islamic State rage on. We know that there is nothing easy about killing. We know the hardships and heartbreaks, the guilt and pain of combat. And yet, we think of going back.

Thomas James Brennan is a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He was a sergeant in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. He was awarded a Purple Heart and is the recipient of a 2013 Dart Center honorable mention and the 2014 American Legion Fourth Estate Award. Follow him on Twitter: @thomasjbrennan

This week, the trial of the man accused of killing Chris Kyle opens in a Texas courtroom, even as the Clint Eastwood film based on Mr. Kyle’s life, “American Sniper,” is playing in a theater three miles away. Much as Mr. Kyle’s death shocked the nation, the film has generated fierce debate nationally over the meaning of his life and his death, and the Iraq war itself. To some, Mr. Kyle represents all that was right with the American-led invasion, to others, all that was wrong. Yet to many veterans, his story offers a chance to discuss and debate a remarkable array of complex and personal questions: the mix of motivations that lead people to sign up in the military, the riot of emotions troops feel when they kill or witness death, the struggle to reengage with civilian society upon coming home. A number of people have sent At War essays about how they viewed the film, including the piece below by a former Marine. What do you think? Send us your thoughts: atwar@nytimes.com.

We arrived at the mall and made our way to the massive IMAX theater where we found all but the first few rows completely full. “At least it’ll be immersive,” my wife said with a look of optimism as we took our seats. “Oh great,” I thought to myself, “an immersive experience of the Iraq war, this ought to be good for me.”

While reading “American Sniper” last year, I saw in Chris Kyle a man who had made himself vulnerable in his struggle to become human again while recounting the events that led him to become America’s most deadly sniper. Now with the movie, I thought that perhaps its six Oscar nominations were an effort by the Academy to say, “This subject is important and we should be taking it seriously.” But it also occurred to me that the nominations were just a figurative pat on their own backs for “serving those who served.”

Photo

Douglas W. Jackson in Iraq in 2007, where he served as a rifleman in the Marines.Credit Courtesy of Douglas W. Jackson

I was reminded of “The Hurt Locker,” which had the movie industry convinced that they’d nailed it. “It seemed so realistic,” I can remember some people telling me. Give me a break. And then there was “Zero Dark Thirty” (also based on a Navy SEAL memoir). It, too, received wide critical acclaim with several Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. Perhaps for some audiences it was an entertaining, climactic moment seeing Osama Bin Laden killed on screen. But I couldn’t help but think of a much more pressing narrative: the nation’s involvement in Afghanistan. I mean, why not show any one of the countless Army units living in the mountains for 12 months at a time, being attacked daily and barely making it out alive?

So with tempered expectations, I watched “American Sniper,” thinking, “Maybe this is Hollywood doing the best it can with limited understanding and budget.” But I started to reach my limit, my list of grievances adding up: gaping entrance wounds and digital blood, poor weapon handling, inaccurate military lingo, blinding muzzle flashes at night with suppressors on the end of M-4 carbines.

Then came a surprise: The scenes of Mr. Kyle returning from war. Initially these moments seemed fairly normal — until I realized that this was a calculated attempt to show how not normal it is to come home with a higher state of vigilance, sense of urgency and suspicion of others, all hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. “That,” I thought, “I can relate to.” Multiple firefights and engagements with the enemy continued to play out, some more accurate than others. But as the film drew to a close, I thought, “They may actually get me after all.”

When Hollywood stepped aside and the story that inspired the film, Mr. Kyle’s death — that was the moment I finally felt overwhelmed. My jaw began to tighten, my eyes fixed on the screen and I dreaded the wave of emotions I knew would come next. When the actual footage of his funeral motorcade played out, with pictures of him and his family and simple white on black text that read, “killed while helping a fellow veteran,” only then did I feel I was finally introduced to the real Chris Kyle.

One of the less discussed messages of the film is how the motivation for joining the military is rarely the motivation for staying in, going back to war or doing the actual fighting. Mr. Kyle signed up in response to the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Africa, as many from my generation joined in response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. But by the time I arrived in Iraq in 2007, “victory” had already been declared. I wasn’t there to rid Iraq of Saddam or prevent another 9/11. I was there to answer a question: “Can I endure the most difficult thing a man can face?” I was there for the war experience. Though it may seem noble to fight for one’s country and family, those weren’t my reasons for going to Iraq. So no one is in my debt, no one owes me anything.

But we do owe it to ourselves to understand the wars we have waged and those who have fought them.

We cannot simply thank the troops and then encourage them to go on with their lives. And we veterans do not have the luxury of remaining silent about our experiences. Everyone admires the “Greatest Generation” for their humility and how unlikely they are to talk about their war memories. But there is no shortage of awareness when a country experiences total war, when sugar is rationed and tens of thousands of men are lost in a single day of fighting. Iraq was so incredibly different. During the past decade of war, less than 1 percent of the American population served in the military at any given time, compared with more than 12 percent during World War II.

My guess is that many veterans will look past the inaccuracies of “American Sniper” because, quite frankly, it’s the best thing we’ve got. Cobra attack helicopters flying during a sandstorm, satellite phone calls home during sandstorms and firefights. I don’t think so. Maybe in Hollywood but not in Iraq. The truth is, we can do so much better than this. But the film could play an important role in reminding us of how unresolved this whole chapter of our history really is. We know Iraq had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, and that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Add to that the recent news of the Islamic State now controlling large parts of Iraq and you have got a generation of veterans who bear an incredibly unique burden.

Yet there’s been a lack of meaningful conversation about the Iraq war in general, and “American Sniper” in particular. Either you loved the film, and so are viewed as a war monger by its critics; or you are a critic of the film and branded unpatriotic by its supporters. We would do well to begin separating these debates and recognizing the difference between those who tell war stories on screen and those who were actually there. And even more, remembering that those who send the country to war are often disconnected from the ones who end up fighting. Unfortunately, these conflicts have exhausted or killed some of those most qualified to speak about the costs of war. What hope do we have if we do not seek to engage with those who remain?
Douglas W. Jackson served four years as a rifleman in the Marines, and was deployed to Iraq during the surge of 2007. He is a recent film school graduate based in Florida. See more of his work at jacksondwj.com

Last year, my co-worker Emma called to let me know she was driving away from Walter Reed for the very last time. She had just resigned. She thought she would feel sadness or have pangs of remorse. But instead she had just felt relieved. It was over.

Emma and I worked together as physical therapists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and then later its reincarnation, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, for nine years.

When we were first hired in 2005, Walter Reed was so busy with incoming casualties there was a rumor that they would erect M*A*S*H tents on the front lawn of the hospital to handle the overflow. That never happened. Instead, when the wards tasked with treating the wounded filled up, the new incoming soldiers (mostly men) went to Ward 67 – the gynecology unit.

In the amputee section, where Emma and I worked, we could tell you exactly how things were going for our ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the troop surges happened in 2007 and 2009, there were so many new amputees coming in that, in one week, I saw three of my co-workers cry. But the wounded kept coming. And somehow, by 2011, we were treating an average of 150 multi-limb amputees a day.

Emma confessed on the phone that she hadn’t felt right for months and had gone to her doctor. She said that after the doctor left the room, she read her chart. She knew she wasn’t super healthy, but it was altogether different to read in black and white that she didn’t exercise, drank frequently and had a stressful job.

I was only half listening, because I had the phone balanced between my shoulder and ear as I tried to pry the cap off a bottle of beer. Walter Reed hadn’t been that healthy for me, either.

You would think that in the amputee clinic you would get used to seeing amputations, but there was always something new. In the beginning, below knee amputations and below elbow amputations were the norm. But as the wars progressed and the bombs and terrain got deadlier, we saw amputations above the knee and above the elbow. And later amputations at the groin. Those progressed to include partial pelvic amputations.

As the amputations moved up the body one night I had a dream that we saw our first body amputee: a patient whose torso and neck had been neatly severed at the head.

How did my co-workers in my dream react when that single head came in? Like we always did: we cheered for him. And we said what we always said, “Look at you! Look how great you are doing!”

The young soldier who was now just a head smiled and agreed with us, relief visibly flooding his face. “I am doing O.K.,” he said, grateful to hear from somebody, anybody, that he was all right.

That’s how it was in our clinic. No matter how badly you were hurt we always thought you were doing great.

In 2009 our first surviving quadruple amputee was pushed into our rehab gym. It was the 100th anniversary of the hospital and outside on the front lawn a big party was going on. As our new patient entered, my co-workers leapt to their feet and let out a uniform “whoop!” As we clapped and cheered, our new patient waved the short stump of his right arm and flashed the room a brave grin.

“He is going to be an ambulator,” my supervisor said at that moment. Because in our clinic you were always going to walk again, no matter the wound.

You would think that working in a clinic that saw so much destruction would be depressing, but life in our clinic was always happy and, above all, funny. The patients wore T-shirts with slogans like “I had a Blast in Afghanistan” and “Marine – Some Assembly Required.” And they made fun of each other for having “paper cuts” instead of amputations.

Scattered among the patients were staff members who would animatedly discuss the latest infomercial we had seen on late night T.V. – prompting one of my colleagues to actually order a powder blue Snuggie (a blanket with sleeves) to wear to work.

When a patient had a birthday, he or she would proudly wear the Snuggie and a special birthday-cake-shaped hat while we stood around their wheelchair and sang loudly, and cheered (of course). We’d present a birthday cake – even though you weren’t supposed to have food in the physical therapy clinic. And then everyone would eat a slice of gooey cake. An hour later, that same patient would receive another birthday cake across the gym in occupational therapy.

Every day we brought in bewildered new amputees to join our playground — on big hospital chairs that you could flatten out and roll like an operating room stretcher. We’d tie their IV poles to the back of the chair and hang their wound vacuum machines, nerve blocks, catheter bags and various drains off the armrests, and then haphazardly push them down the long corridors to the rehab gym. Their family members would trail behind us, mute with shock.

To fill in the silence of the voyage we would prattle happily along, pointing out all the great places the young veteran could visit in the hospital: the DFAC (dining facility), the barber shop, the PX (military store) — once he or she was well enough to get into a wheelchair. The highlight of our “tour” was passionately describing the weekly cafeteria specials to our captive and stunned audience.

But before an eyebrow could be raised, the tour was interrupted with a sharp warning: “Bump!” And the patient would brace him or herself for the incredible jolt of pain as their stretcher rolled over the smallest crack in the floor. And we, the staff, did our best to buffer it for them.
Adele Levine worked as a physical therapist at Walter Reed from 2005 until 2014, and is now in private practice in Silver Spring, Md. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Washingtonian and Psychology Today, and she is the author of “Run, Don’t Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center.” Follow her on Twitter: @PTAdele.

No millennial worth his iPhone remembers life before social media. While previous generations’ warfighters wrote letters or phoned home over spotty connections, Marines today can post on Instagram photos of themselves sitting atop cans of ammunition. In 2010, the photojournalist Teru Kuwayama and his collaborators embedded in Afghanistan to start a Facebook page for the First Battalion, Eighth Marines to communicate with loved ones. Far from resulting in just another live-stream of minutiae, their Basetrack project became a way for deployed troops to maintain relationships with their families. The resulting trove of photos and videos provide ample fodder for “Basetrack Live” — the onstage story of one corporal’s deployment and homecoming, and the effects on his family.

For both the battalion and a nation’s artists, self-reflection occurred stunningly quickly through the use of social media. Anne Hamburger, executive producer of En Garde Arts, the company behind “Basetrack Live,” said she felt it was important to document the human side of going to war, without sensationalizing the experience.

“The issues are so complex” when an ordinary person deploys, Ms. Hamburger said. Her biggest challenge for the production, which is showing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will be going on a national tour, was paring down the “incredible wealth of material,” she said.

Ms. Hamburger reached out through Facebook, gathering more than 100 respondents and conducting three dozen interviews to cull images and video for the project. Every word in “Basetrack Live” is taken from interviews with Marines or members of their families.

This citizen journalism captures the truth of troops’ feelings during deployment, including graffiti about pornography, and profane, funny rules for standing watch and cleaning toilets. The images chosen for the production reflect the Marines’ brotherhood, including an impressive assortment of tattoos. Because of the authentic, emotion-rich material, the Marines are painted neither as heroes nor victims.

The plot delves into the relationship between Cpl. A. J. Czubai and his wife, Melissa. Corporal Czubai is played by Tyler La Marr, a former Marine Corps sergeant and the founder of the Society of Artistic Veterans. Mr. La Marr is quick to point out that his experiences as a signals intelligence analyst in Iraq were distinctly different from Corporal Czubai’s infantry deployments to Afghanistan.

Initially, Mr. La Marr was worried that Corporal Czubai would be angry “because a pogue is telling his story!” he said in an interview, referring to military slang for “a person other than grunt,” or infantryman. But talking with Corporal Czubai helped, and the actor acknowledged that his boot camp training, with its ethos of “every Marine a rifleman,” gave him a head start on the role.

Melissa Czubai, played by Ashley Bloom, wrestles with a lack of control over situations engineered by the Marine Corps, including A. J.’s inability to be present for the birth of their daughter because of his predeployment training. “Basetrack Live” also includes the perspectives of other wives and girlfriends, and that of one Marine’s mother, to illustrate the war’s toll on families.

The web of relationships also highlights the desire of civilians to hear from Marines in close-to-real-time, bringing to light the space between deployed and home environments, and the nuanced human drama that it spans. Social media’s rapid communications can be a mixed blessing, as worries on the home front can be transmitted to deployed troops, and electrons can convey flaring tempers in both directions. Of greatest concern were erroneous reports of casualties on Facebook, which only served to accelerate the rumor mill among wives and girlfriends. In Corporal Czubai’s case, his wife learned of his best friend’s death before he did, even though he was in a neighboring company in Afghanistan.

The speed of modern life, reflected in social media, can also be jarring to nerves accustomed to a contained, mission-focused environment. After being wounded in a firefight, Corporal Czubai is sent back to the United States, while his comrades carry on in Afghanistan. This loss of his unit’s camaraderie disorients him. Overwhelmed by paranoia and guilt, he drinks, buys an array of weapons, threatens suicide and struggles with a strained marriage. He eventually accepts counseling from the Department of Veterans Affairs, but the play avoids a saccharine ending.

Now out of the Marine Corps and studying for a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, Corporal Czubai has seen several performances of “BaseTrack Live” and found the adaptation of his story “captivating.”

Ms. Hamburger said that she intended for the show to walk a fine line: conveying emotion without being overly sentimental about the participants’ experiences. The music — original compositions by Edward Bilous, Michelle DiBucci and Greg Kalember — blends a variety of styles: the rush of initial deployment to Afghanistan mixes powerful hip-hop with tribal tunes, while the disorientation of combat is illustrated by crashing rock and bright lights.

Using authentic videos and images, “Basetrack Live” offers a realistic perspective on relationships when one partner has gone to war, and how, after the long road home, social media can be a useful tool to build a sense of community. The wives and girlfriends of those serving in the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, who found each other via the project’s Facebook page, offered one another support, including tactics for waking sleeping Marines with hair-trigger reactions. And many of the Marines, themselves, stayed in touch with one another long after returning home, and were trading bear hugs at Tuesday night’s performance.

In future wars, the speed of communication will only get faster. Short of hologramming into combat, service members’ loved ones cannot get much closer than connecting daily via social media. Emotionally, this can blur the lines between battlefield and home front. “Basetrack Live” ably captures this juxtaposition and its aftermath, affording viewers a fresh look at war’s realities and at the challenges of coming home.
“Basetrack Live” was adapted by Jason Grote in collaboration with Seth Bockley and Anne Hamburger. It is playing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, (651 Fulton St, Brooklyn) through Saturday.

Teresa Fazio was a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006 and deployed to Iraq. She lives and works in New York, and is writing a memoir about a relationship during deployment.

Marines of the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment responded to enemy contact in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

On Nov. 6, 2004, NATO forces launched an assault on Falluja, a city north of Baghdad that had become a magnet for Sunni insurgent forces. Thomas Brennan, then a 19-year-old Marine Corps lance corporal, was one of the infantrymen with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment who would participate in the attack. The battalion suffered numerous casualties in the battle, one of the bloodiest for American forces since Vietnam. Now a journalism student, Mr. Brennan recalls the battle with the help of some of the Marines and sailors he fought beside.

Grains of sand floated through motionless air as beams of light crept through sandbagged windows. Young men sat mesmerized by the words echoing from walls scarred by years of war.

Through cigarette smoke and desert confetti, Doug Bahrns, who was then a Marine second Lieutenant, exuded confidence and trepidation as he explained over two hours the details of our mission and what should happen when — not if — we were wounded. He paused often, gazing into the darkness above our heads. He knew he wouldn’t bring us all home.

Now a major assigned to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Major Bahrns recalled recently the weight he felt leading Marines “into such a large-scale fight where it was inevitable someone was going to get killed.”

“Nov. 10, 2004, is one of the most significant days of my life, changing not only my life, but other’s lives,” Major Bahrns said. “It put into perspective life, death and the brotherhood within military service. That was the first day, alongside my fellow Marines, that I truly felt I’d cemented my place among them.”

Ten years ago, roughly 13,500 American, British and Iraqi forces attacked Falluja, Iraq, where roughly 4,000 insurgents fought from trenches, tunnels and houses, using improvised explosive devices, rifles, rockets and machine guns. During the 46-day battle, roughly 2,000 insurgents were killed and 1,500 captured. By Dec. 23, 107 members of coalition forces had died and 613 were wounded. Alongside Lieutenant Bahrns, in Alpha Company, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, 17 died and 102 were wounded. It was the heaviest urban combat since the 1968 Battle of Hue City during the Vietnam War.

Before Lieutenant Bahrns’s first sunset in Falluja, he screamed for a corpsman to save his good friend, First Lt. Daniel T. Malcolm. Lieutenant Malcolm loved to study military tactics as much as he loved playing chess, which to him was yet another way he could train his mind to defeat an opponent. If life were a brilliancy — a deeply strategic chess match — he made his a brevity, which is winning a chess game in 25 moves — his age when he was killed in action.

I regret playing chess with Lieutenant Malcolm only once. After four months of convoys as his driver, I struggle now that I didn’t allow myself to hurt when he died. I was never lucky enough to befriend the man I admired most.

Sgt. Billy Leo is everything I imagine a Bronx native to be – crude and opinionated with a hair trigger, once tearing my “Yankees Suck” T-shirt from my body. I can’t count how many times he pointed out my mistakes, but I cherish the times he gave me his approval.

“Falluja got the better of me once I came home. I really missed it even though it sucked,” said Mr. Leo, a 37-year-old New York City firefighter. “There isn’t one day where I don’t think about that battle.”

“It was a lot of adrenaline,” he added. “Nothing will ever give you that feeling again.”

Photo

The helmet of a Marine from the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, bears the names of brethren killed in action during the battle of Falluja.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

Mike Ergo, then a corporal, admired Sergeant Leo’s leadership and feared wearing Red Sox attire. November, for Mr. Ergo, is no longer a month he avoids. His daughter Adeline was born on Nov. 4, 2010, and his career providing peer support to other veterans led him to pursue a master’s degree in clinical social work.

Working as a counselor at the Department of Veterans Affairs Vet Center in Concord, Calif., has helped him “come home.” Battling guilt, loss and grief for years, Mr. Ergo credits his career with helping him overcome living with the loss of life, both American and Iraqi.

“I’d do it all again, even if I knew I wouldn’t agree with the political reasons or if I knew all of the fighting wouldn’t bring peace to the region,” said Mr. Ergo, 31. “The level of love and commitment we have for our fellow Marines means that you’ll go through hell with them not wanting to trade places with anyone.”

Fighting alongside us in First Platoon was Staff Sgt. Adam Banotai. In his squad of 17, he watched 11 Marines become casualties. His platoon earned 37 Purple Heart medals and five awards for valor.

“It petrifies me that I made a decision that was based off of my feelings and not good tactical judgment,” said Mr. Banotai. “None of what my guys say makes me stop thinking I could have pushed them harder, saved them from shedding so much blood. Those men are my heroes.”

Since Nov. 26, 2004, Reinaldo Aponte, then a petty officer third class line corpsman, has felt pained when he remembered the Marine he could not save. He was pulled away from Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth’s body believing he had done his best. But replaying the situation in his mind since, he still wonders: Could he have done more?

“I didn’t look at any of the Marines. I was so angry, screaming incoherently. I cried, feeling like I’d let my squad down,” said Mr. Aponte, now 31, of Milwaukee. “I was scared they wouldn’t trust me anymore. I didn’t want them to be afraid to call on me as their corpsman. I needed to remain a part of the squad. I was afraid of losing all of them because I lost Brad.”

As the chaplain for our battalion, Lt. Dennis Cox spent hours with us discussing our concerns. He tried to justify killing the enemy. He prayed for each of us. He wiped tears from our eyes. He cleaned the blood from the faces of our fallen. He too, cannot stop reliving our battle.

He is now a commander in the Chaplain Corps at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. “When they die, a part of you goes with them,” Commander Cox said. “We smell something, we see something, we hear something and it triggers something we were doing 10 years ago.”

Over the years, Commander Cox has stayed in touch with the families of our fallen. Just like us, he considers them family. For him, it’s a painful reminder of how much they lost.

Kathleen Faircloth knew what to expect. Her son, Bradley, was wounded twice before the second battle of Falluja. Marines standing in their dress uniforms at her front door meant only one thing. For 10 years, she hasn’t showed anger toward our platoon. Instead, she is glad we remember her son. As long as his memory is alive, she said, she will find happiness.

Photo

Lance Cpl. Bradley Faircloth in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.Credit Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan

“I lost a son, but I gained children across the country. I know that if I ever needed anything, they would do anything they could to help me,” said Ms. Faircloth, now 50, of Fairhope, Ala. “I hope they find peace in their heart, because seeing them miserable isn’t how I want to see them.”

Whether still in uniform or having moved on to a different chapter of our lives, remembering is something we can’t fail to do. While some have a memorial in Massachusetts, Alabama or at The Citadel, some veterans of Falluja remember each of their fallen brethren through writing, by advocating for the Iraqi families we displaced, or by displaying the noble and true face of our generation.

In the last 10 years, we’ve lost sons, brothers, wives and children, struggling to maintain our own sanity and even after many failed attempts, we continue helping one another from becoming part of the suicide epidemic. Some of us, much like in Falluja, are still bounding house-to-house, searching for something we left behind and a way to evade what we brought home.

Thomas James Brennan is studying investigative journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before being medically retired in 2012, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines. He is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and the recipient of a 2013 Dart Center honorable mention and the 2014 American Legion Fourth Estate Award. Follow him on Twitter: @thomasjbrennan

“You know you won a free round-trip ticket to Afghanistan?” a perpetually busy chief master sergeant asked me one warm winter evening. We were at the gym at Robins Air Force Base in Houston County, Ga., after a day spent serving on a panel of public affairs chiefs.

“You’re kidding,” I said. Weights clanked behind us. “I saw my name on a deployment list, but there was a question mark beside it.” All afternoon, my hopes had hung on that question mark.

“No question sir. You made the list. You’re going to ISAF headquarters in Kabul,” he said, referring to the United States-led international force in Afghanistan. He beamed like he was handing me a winning lotto ticket. It was January 2013. I was scheduled to deploy in 15 months.

To him, deployment amounted to the opportunity of a lifetime. At that moment, it seemed to me like some surreal theft. I’d miss another New England summer, every birthday in my immediate family and my 33rd wedding anniversary. As a 30-year Air Force Reserve veteran, I’d spent months away from home, but never deployed to a war zone. So I was a decade overdue. But while the Air Force Reserve asks for volunteers to go overseas, I had assumed they don’t involuntarily deploy 53-year-old grandfathers.

They do.

When I called my wife, Debby, that evening to tell her the news, she said, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”

I felt old. I took a walk around the gorgeous Georgia base, grateful to be away from the frigid New England winter, feeling alternately numb and angry to be “non-vol’d.” The crepe myrtles bloomed and the sun warmed my arms as the notion crept up my spine: I’m going to Afghanistan.

In the evening, after opening the Gideon Bible to the 23rd Psalm and glancing at the familiar words – “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …” – I slept in fits until about 3 a.m., then not at all. In the dark, short, violent movies kept looping in my head. Somebody would burn another Quran and 40,000 protesters – 1 percent of Kabul’s population – would storm the gate. An Afghan would come to work and start shooting, like what happened when a colleague was killed at Kabul International Airport. Looping, like bad songs that won’t stop.

The next day, I asked the Reserve Command director, a thoughtful colonel, “What are my options?”

So I started a year of intense training holding two opposing notions in balance: “I can’t believe they’re sending me to Afghanistan,” and, “What a great opportunity.” During one week of training, I learned how to greet someone in Dari, how to kill an enemy using a chokehold and how to save a shooting victim’s life with quick-clot bandages. Ironically, the Dari greeting, “salaam alaykum,” means “peace be with you.” I read thousands of pages of material on the nuances of Afghan culture, how to spot a roadside bomb, how to evade enemy capture. There were also facts I hoped not to need: Grasshoppers, ants and worms are edible; hairy or brightly colored insects are not. I learned that Afghanistan is a “nation of minorities,” with Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks accounting for about 87 percent of the population, but none representing a majority.

Two weeks before flying overseas I attended combat training at Fort Dix, N.J. It was the hardest training I’d done, physically and mentally, since officer training school in 1984. On the first day, with Army and Marine trainers yelling above simulated explosions, we learned that the Hollywood notion of low-crawling on your elbows actually is high-crawling. In a real low-crawl, you drag your head or helmet along the ground. I can’t low-crawl for more than a few feet without stopping to gasp for air, I discovered, while hauling 70 pounds of body armor and equipment.

Our instructor warned us that on the day we conducted urban assault exercises, we would get shot with metal-capped plastic bullets.

“Only the first shot hurts,” he said.

I didn’t believe him. The night before our turn at urban assault, I stuffed my uniform pockets with padding – a spare notebook, a pair of combat gloves. But our “aggressors,” all expert marksmen, took great delight in shooting us in the few square inches they knew we couldn’t pad. At one point mid-exercise, my M-4 jammed and I stopped moving to “slap and snap” my weapon. In those two seconds, I got shot on the inside thigh, just below the protective groin cup. It stung hard, and would eventually swell up to baseball size. But my instructor was right: I got shot twice more that day and never felt either bullet.

After eight days of travel and delays – from Norfolk, Va., to Pease, N.H., to Germany, Kuwait, Qatar, and a staging base in Afghanistan – I arrived at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, wearing my helmet and heavy body armor, dragging more than 300 pounds of gear. I joined the battle rhythm of working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, at the Media Operations Center as chief of future operations. In my first two months in-country, I lost 15 pounds without trying.

At Camp ISAF, beauty and ugliness mingled. Around the perimeter stood a beige, prisonlike concrete blast T-wall, meant to save us from rocket attacks. Razor wire surrounded various compounds within the main camp. Gray dust settled on everything. Across from the ISAF commander’s building was the pristine Destille Garden, with green grass, cozy pavilions and a spacious brick fire pit. At the entrance, a waterfall trickled down a series of bowls. Next door sat three faded porta-potties and seven rusty storage containers.

In my job, the mundane and the noble mingled. For hours each week, I served as a “PowerPoint Ranger,” working into the night to align information in boxes and shade one section of a briefing medium green instead of light green on a slide that might flash on a screen for 10 seconds in a crowded conference room. Other times, I helped plan events that were reported globally.

On June 25, sweating under the Afghan sun, while two Black Hawk helicopters buzzed overhead, I met Afghan Brig. Gen. Jamila Bayaz, Kabul’s first female police chief. She’d been the target of multiple death threats since she started on the Kabul police force 30 years ago, simply because she’s a woman. In her gray uniform and black hijab, she spoke with grace and confidence about bringing more women onto the force for the good of Afghanistan, and afterward I felt like I’d witnessed a brief moment of something noble.

The less-spotlighted people I met here provided another window into courage: One Afghan woman who worked on the ISAF compound to support her family said, “The Taliban would kill me if they knew I worked here.” She was just one of a parade of Afghan soldiers and civilians who have taken the brunt of the violence in this long war.

The beauty and nobility often seem alloyed with something more dangerous. After a news conference, as I was escorting reporters and cameramen to the gate, I asked one reporter if she felt safe living in Kabul. “Not lately, after the bombing,” she said. “We used to throw parties every week, but now we don’t meet together in the evenings, except when we have to attend events for work.” She was referring to an incident on Jan. 17, when a suicide bomber entered the Taverna du Liban, a Lebanese restaurant popular with Western journalists. After the explosion, two gunmen rushed in and fired on diners. Twenty-one people died. In another scare, on July 3, insurgents launched two rockets that exploded at Kabul International Airport, near the ISAF compound. No one was injured, but they caused millions of dollars in damage.

On July 18, 12 of us went from ISAF to a charitable organization in west Kabul to drop off 800 pounds of clothes, school supplies and even some purple lollipops. I was apprehensive. The day before, insurgents had attacked a compound near the airport for nearly five hours. But it ended up being my favorite day in Afghanistan. Then, on Aug. 5, an insider attack at Camp Qargha in Kabul killed Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, the highest ranking American to die in the war, and injured 15 others, including a friend – a tall bodybuilder who seemed indestructible. I can’t help thinking that for all the briefings and PowerPoint slides I prepared, my best contributions were dropping off school supplies and comforting some of the Camp Qargha survivors.

This mingling of high and low seems as old as war. During my going-away party, I quoted Shakespeare’s lines from “Henry V.” When Henry’s army is at its worst, sick and rain-soaked, he tells the French messenger, Mountjoy, “We would not seek a battle, as we are; Nor as we are, we say, we shall not shun it.” I don’t think I’d trust someone who sought out war without questioning why. So I walked around Camp ISAF, looking for the noble amid the gray dust and green gardens, as competing notions – “I can’t believe they sent me here,” and, “What a great opportunity” – staged their own battle.

A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, James Gleason Bishop served in Afghanistan as a public affairs officer at headquarters, International Security Assistance Force from April to August 2014. He’s completing a memoir on his time in Afghanistan. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of NATO, the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force or the United States government.

As bow-tied waiters cleared plates and emptied coffee cups inside a plush meeting room at the Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan earlier this month, about 30 veterans from nearby community colleges listened to representatives from Yale, Dartmouth, Wesleyan and Vassar describe their veterans programs and answer questions about academics, financial aid and housing.

Rob Cuthbert, an enlisted Army veteran and member of the fiduciary board of the Yale Veterans Association who helped to organize the event, said the session was an attempt to address a phenomenon he referred to as an “exigent crisis”: the small numbers of veterans attending elite four-year colleges and universities.

“Numbers from the Department of Labor suggest that there are at least 1.4 million veterans without bachelor’s degrees,” Mr. Cuthbert said in a phone interview. “A bachelor’s degree is a key tool for socioeconomic mobility in today’s economy. Enlisted veterans should not doubt that there are clear pathways to Ivy League and peer schools.”

According to school administrators, there was one undergraduate veteran attending Princeton during the 2013-14 academic year, out of 5,244 undergraduates. Harvard had four among its roughly 6,700 undergraduates. Brown had 11 out of 6,182. Dartmouth, whose former president, James Wright, is an enlisted Marine Corps veteran who encourages veterans to continue their education during his visits to military hospitals, had 18 of 4,276.

Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs also shows that less than one half of one percent of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill money paid since 2009 has gone to individuals attending Ivy League schools. Of that relatively small amount, an even smaller portion went to enlisted veterans attending undergraduate programs at those colleges. The remainder went to dependents of service members, officers or enlisted veterans attending graduate programs.

In response to those numbers, organizations like the Posse Foundation have turned their attention to bringing more veterans to the nation’s colleges. The foundation was started in 1989 to help underrepresented students to enter top-tier schools. Two years ago, Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar College, began working with the group to apply their model — which focuses on helping exceptional community college students gain admission to elite four-year colleges — to veterans.

The Posse Foundation mandates that every member of a class attend a monthlong training seminar designed to prepare them for the rigors of full-time scholarship and to promote camaraderie among the members. Additionally, members must begin as first-year students, regardless of how many community college credits they have accrued.

As of this year, Vassar has successfully matriculated two veteran cohorts, bringing the number of veterans at Vassar to 21, out of 2,450 undergraduates. The hope is to continue to admit one group of veterans every year, which would mean, in two years, veterans would constitute nearly 1.5 percent of the student body, should overall enrollment remain the same.

“One of the things we have been trying to do over the last decade or so is create a diverse student body,” Ms. Hill said. “This effort is part of creating that diversity.”

This year, Wesleyan University followed Vassar’s lead and admitted 10 veterans to its freshman class under the Posse program.

“The goal,” Ms. Hill said, “is to get 10 to 12 schools in the program. With the current three cohorts in place, we will be able to converse with other schools about how they might make this program work for them.”

But matriculating veterans is a complex operation. Most four-year colleges cater to students between the ages of 18 and 22. Student veterans, on the other hand, tend to be older, are sometimes married or have children, and can present challenges different to those of a typical undergraduate student.

Dan MacDonald, 50, a freshman at Dartmouth, is married and has a 10-year-old daughter. Though he was able to secure off-campus housing with help from faculty members, he will attend the first term alone, leaving his family behind on Long Island.

“I’ll be there for 10 weeks and then back for six,” he said. “It’s almost like I’m deploying.”

For some veterans, the deferment of their education has increased their desire to complete it rapidly, which can undermine a traditional four-year liberal arts experience.

“I found it to be a struggle because I already had a different mind-set about going back to school,” said Chadelle Sappa, 24, who began taking classes at Georgia Regents University after five years in the Army. “I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. I had already delayed my education so much that all I wanted was to get out and get a good job.”

Ms. Sappa said she felt alienated from her fellow classmates and that she considered dropping out after one semester.

“There was no community,” she said. “And the lack of a social network affected how well I did in school. After that semester, I thought about deploying again.”

But instead, Ms. Sappa attended a rigorous academic workshop at Yale University run by the Warrior-Scholar Project, an organization that helps veterans transition from the military into college. Ms. Sappa said that the experience helped her refocus on school and return to college with confidence. She is now a second-semester freshman at Georgia Regents and is considering applying to Yale.

Carl Callender, a member of the first veteran cohort at Vassar, was working full time and attending classes at Bronx Community College when he learned about Vassar’s initiative.

“My plan was, at the time, to get my associate’s degree and then transfer to Hunter or Baruch,” he said, referring to two campuses of the City University of New York. “I was at a point where I felt that certain opportunities were no longer available to me. But then along came Posse.”

Mr. Callender, who served in the Marine Corps Reserve for eight years, said that the transition to campus life was hard, but greatly eased by the presence of a group of veterans.

“I stuck out like a sore thumb,” Mr. Callender, 35, said of his first day on campus. But his fellow veterans provided social support. “I had people I knew, people I could eat with and people I could study with.”

Even so, returning to school had been a somewhat disorienting, if positive, experience.

“It’s awkward coming here,” he said of Vassar, where he is a sophomore. “It’s almost like someone hit the reset button. Five years ago I would have been able to tell you exactly what I wanted to do. But now, I am like a kid in a candy store.”
Jacob W. Sotak served in the United States Army Reserve for 10 years, including a tour in Afghanistan. He graduated from Dartmouth College and now works as a news assistant at The New York Times. Follow him on Twitter: @JWSotak

Just before Sept. 11, 2001, my teenage brother Mike, fresh from Air Force training, pressed something small into my palm: two pin-backings stubbed on a curled shape in dusky silver. Jump wings.

“If you keep them safe, I’ll always be safe,” he said.

My brothers and I had always tried to protect each other. Chris, the younger, was calm, but Mike was rambunctious. When I was 4 and they were toddlers, I would sneak into their room past midnight to ensure they still occupied their dual cribs. I would poke a finger through the crib slats, slide up their eyelids, and check their breathing as they slept. Safe in their company, I would curl up on the floor for a minute, then pad back to my pink-swathed bed. But by elementary school, our parents had divorced, and anger ran through our thin walls.

When I was 14, our stepfather and Mike, 12, got in a fight over pajamas. Too cowardly to burst in, I stayed in bed and turned up my Walkman. Mike sobbed himself to sleep with a nosebleed that soaked his mattress. He had misbehaved, but my crime felt worse — I had let him thrash alone. As the years passed, conflicts with our stepfather prompted police cruiser lights on our street. When I finished high school, Mike’s card to me read, “…Stay another year? Please?” I should have ensured my brothers grew up strong. Instead I fled.

At 18, I paid for college with a Marine Corps R.O.T.C. scholarship; the military’s rules seemed enlightened next to the ones back home. Mike later barreled into the same Boston unit as an Air Force cadet. He tagged along on field exercises with us upperclassmen, easily completing grueling hikes and rappelling down university buildings. My senior year, the Twin Towers fell, and I knew at some point I would deploy. The following June, Mike and Chris pinned gold lieutenant bars on my shoulders.

Photo

Teresa Fazio receiving her Marine Corps commission in 2002, with her two brothers, Chris on the left and Mike on the right. Credit Courtesy of Teresa Fazio

Two years later, on an Iraqi base, I nervously strapped myself into an androgynous Kevlar jacket. Tromping around our gravel-strewn compound, I doled out candy and phone cards while waiting for mortars to fall. We plodded through our days, trusting in grace that wherever we stepped was safe. Late at night, when the desert heat lifted, I taught my Marines martial arts. As we punched foam mats and dragged each other through the sand, I wondered how my fist would feel against my stepfather’s face, how much pressure my forearm required to choke his carotid artery. But I could not predict the techniques my sparring partners threw; I could only try to counter them. And my rage did not help me lead.

One night, I ordered my troops to repair broken cables across an exposed airfield. Mortars exploded in front of them. Riddled with anxiety, I monitored the radio, counting heads. My dog tags said I was 23 years old. I felt 80.

Meanwhile, Mike graduated from R.O.T.C. He mailed me his uniform cap on which to fasten his lieutenant’s insignia, a shiny “butterbar,” the same way he had once pinned on mine. I sent it back from Iraq, properly pinned, with two more matte-bronze lieutenant bars thrown into the envelope for good luck.

In war, officers mark their rank subtly in order to hide from snipers. In childhood, I had learned to fly under the radar. From 8,000 miles away, I still tried to coach my firebrand brother on avoiding trouble. But soon he had become a combat controller, jumping from planes and calling in airstrikes for troops on the ground. His specialized training would supersede all of my advice. The Marine in me was impressed. The sister in me was terrified.

Still, I knew where his jump wings were. I had pinned them into a nylon wallet next to a note from our late Italian grandmother. On a hospital menu, she had written, “Non dare a calci ogni piccola pietra per strada — aspetta per una piri grande.” “Do not kick every small stone on the road — wait for a large rock.” That is, pick your battles.

I picked Iraq. As I waited for my Marines to call me from that mortar-scarred airfield, I knew we were also at risk from rockets in the shower or the radio tent. Ducking prematurely was no guard against hardship. My platoon proved lucky; despite my new-lieutenant stumbles, we all lived. And however much I cared for Mike, I couldn’t completely protect him, whether from family violence, incoming rounds, or planes in a blue autumn sky. Now it was his turn to jump.

He survived his first deployment, and the next, and four more after that. He is currently serving on his seventh tour overseas. So I trust in dark, brushed metal. And I keep his jump wings safe.

Teresa Fazio spent four years as a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006, deploying once to Iraq. She lives and works in New York City and is writing a memoir about a deployment relationship.

It is 12 a.m. in the land of the midnight sun. Seventy-two hours until deployment. I should be at home with my wife, Jen, and 6-month-old son or unpacking the house we bought recently. Instead, I’m on my bike riding home from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. A rowdy group rides down another trail that merges with mine, cycling in a pack in front of me. They laugh, pull beers from messenger bags, see me and offer me one. The exchange is tour-worthy. An anonymous rider pulls out a cold Olympia and reaches toward me. His eyes remain on the trail ahead, as do mine. I extend a blind left hand, close the gap, find the front of the can. For a moment we are connected by cheap beer. Then he lets go and it is all mine. I toast the rowdies and ride ahead.

***

On Jan. 13, my wife’s water broke, just as I put the final touches on my application to the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. While I drove, frenzied, across town for a post office, she held out through rising contractions. Finnegan Shichiro Komatsu made his entry that night, and a month later a letter came in the mail. I was in, accepted into the creative nonfiction program.

Photo

Matt Komatsu and his son, Finn. Credit Megan Marlene Photography

The university program is low residency: a correspondence course for all but two weeks every summer. During the residency, students from all over the globe — and from three genres (fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry) — converged on the Anchorage campus. For two weeks, it was 12 hours a day of writing: poetry, fiction, readings, lectures, manuscript workshops. Immersed in an unfamiliar world, windows to new material opened hourly.

Because the program required so little time on campus, I did not have to quit my job to pursue the degree. The course work for my first semester was online. When it was time for the residency, I took leave, shed my uniform, pulled on some civvies and rode my bike to class.

Among the better-known veteran writers of recent wars, Brian Turner, author of “Here, Bullet” and “My Life as a Foreign Country,” took his M.F.A. credentials to the battlefield and returned with devastating poetry. Phil Klay got his degree not long after leaving the Marines and wrote an acclaimed collection of stories titled “Redeployment.” And Ron Capps, author of “Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years,” got a master’s before serving with the Army and the State Department in various war-torn areas, including Afghanistan and Rwanda. He credits writing with saving his life.

Veterans who are writers are no different from civilian writers in that we bring the same baggage to the keyboard. Emotional trauma, the minefield of cliché and self-doubt are common to all writers. However, what sets us apart is that we veterans arrive with a litany of cultural tags, some of which are self-enforced, others undeserved, all entirely unhelpful: the other one percent, uneducated high school dropouts with no better options, mindless automatons.

I showed up for the residency, cautious after a semester of online classes. Nothing in my virtual interactions with classmates indicated a need to worry. But how much can you hope to learn about someone when your interface is limited to, say, trading online perspectives about Anne Lamott’s essay on terrible first drafts? I arrived, sweating from my hurried bike ride, and looked for the boogeyman.

Instead I found men and women genuinely interested in my writing, which occurs on the peripheries of war and military life. My classmates included pacifists, Occupy movement enthusiasts, stay-at-home fathers, touchy-feely poets and backcountry risk-takers. But labels fell away when we workshopped one another’s manuscripts.

We each submitted two manuscripts and for hours each day workshopped them, which was the core of the residency. Nobody got a pass. One of my manuscripts covered the Japanese tsunami of 2011 — during which my grandmother died — and my subsequent deployment to Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo. An emotional facade crumbled during the workshop and I broke down. My classmates smiled and told me that the essay was good but that the structure needed work. My other manuscript, a retelling of my experience during an attack on Bastion air base in Afghanistan, was “confusing” and filled with “military jargon” that isolated the reader, they told me. During the workshop I was no longer an airman or a veteran. I was a writer, just like everyone else.

I asked a fellow Air Force Academy alumnus, Brandon Lingle, about his M.F.A. experience. He joined Brian Turner’s M.F.A. program this year at Sierra Nevada College in Nevada, and is now deployed to Afghanistan. During his first residency, Brandon’s classmates wanted to know more about the veteran experience and understood that he was about to deploy, which, he said, “helped humanize the concept for those who had never been exposed to the military.”

If there is debate over whether M.F.A. programs produce good writers, none exists where connection is concerned. And that is precisely what I am after. Near the end of my first semester, a classmate asked the question in our online forum: “Why do you write?”

My response was two paragraphs. Both described what it was like to witness an airman receive a Silver Star, then drink with him and a man whose life he saved. The first paragraph described the ceremony, the heroics, everything you could absorb in a hurried read or on the Silver Star citation itself. The second paragraph characterized the struggles both men now face in negotiating simple day-to-day living.

You can get all of the former on your own, I wrote. I’m here to deliver the latter.

***

I balance an increasingly foamy beer while maneuvering my bike around and over frost heaves in the pavement. Caught in the moment under the shadow of an evergreen canopy, I find a smile on my face. An unlikely beer. A shot off the page that hits the reader just right. While the former was serendipitous and the latter desired, both are inextricably tied to the risk I took when I sent in my M.F.A. application. That decision positioned me right where I am. It will lead me ahead, converging and diverging with other paths as it may.

I finish the ride and park my bike next to garage boxes. I tiptoe into Finn’s room, kiss his sleeping form, then find Jen in the bedroom, where she is unpacking. “Do I have a story for you,” I say.

Matthew Komatsu is a full-time Alaska Air National Guardsman. He and his wife, Jen, recently had their first son, Finnegan. Matthew is one semester closer to a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction writing from the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, the Defense Department or any branch of the United States government.

About

At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

Archive

Recent Posts

Marine Corps Captain Calum Rammhe, a longtime marathon runner, ran seven marathons on seven continents in seven days to raise money for a charity that supports wounded Marines and their families. It also let him reflect on why running is more than a hobby for him. Read more…